Curated by Jon Sueda and featuring 37 projects by Bay Area and international artists, All Possible Futures is the first of three SOMArts Commons Curatorial Residency exhibitions in 2014. The group exhibition explores the potential of graphic design and celebrates a questioning of boundaries regarding concepts, processes, technologies, and form. Contemporary speculative pieces take the form of both physical objects and restaged installations.
This survey is a product of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) 2001 Working Group, a project of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. Sponsored by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the working group is an independent, honest-broker effort intended to build intellectual capital for the upcoming QDR. More specifically, it aims to frame issues, develop options, and provide insights for the Chairman, the services, and the next administration in three areas: defense strategy, criteria for sizing conventional forces, and force structure for 2005-2010. One of the group's initial tasks was to assess the future security environment to the year 2025. This was pursued by surveying the available literature to identify areas of consensus and debate. The goal was to conduct an assessment that would be far more comprehensive than any single research project or group effort could possibly produce. This survey documents major areas of agreement and disagreement across a range of studies completed since the last QDR in 1997. Because it distills a variety of sources and organizes and compares divergent views, this volume makes a unique contribution to the literature. It also provides a particularly strong set of insights and assumptions on which both strategists and force planners can draw in the next Quadrennial Defense Review. This survey does not claim to predict or illustrate all possible wars that Anmrica might face between now and the year 2025. Rather, it attempts, through analysis of representative and reputable sources, to incorporate the most likely characteristics of the future security environment into a single scenario, while heightening our awareness of dissenting viewpoints and plausible wild cards.
A collection of short stories that "offers an idiosyncratic series of 'what-ifs' about our fragile human condition ... What if your perfect hermaphrodite match existed on another planet? What if you could suddenly see through everybody's skin to their organs? What if you knew the exact date of your death? What if your city was filled with doppelgangers of you? Forced to navigate these bizarre scenarios, Phillips' characters search for solutions to the problem of how to survive in an irrational, infinitely strange world"--
An exploration of the utopias and dystopias that could develop from present society Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism and extermininsm might actually entail. Could the current rise of the real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender's Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of wealth—but there's no guarantee that social hierarchies, governed by an economy of "likes," wouldn't rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through science fiction, social theory and the new technologies are already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a balance sheet of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.
What are the basic building blocks of the world? This book presents a naturalistic theory saying that the universe and everything in it can be reduced to three fundamental entities: a field, a set of values that can be actualized at different places in the field, and an actualizer of the values. The theory is defended by using it to answer the main questions in metaphysics, such as: What is causality, existence, laws of nature, consciousness, thinking, free will, time, mathematical entities, ethical values, etc.? The theory is compared with the main alternatives and argued to solve problems better than the existing theories. Several new theories are suggested, such as how to understand mental causation, free will and the truth of ethics and mathematics.
Is another future possible? So called ‘late modernity’ is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social–natural, techno–scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only critically account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities and that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention, and experimentation.
Mathematical modelling and simulation is an increasingly powerful area of mathematics and computer science, which in recent years has been fuelled by the unprecedented access to larger than ever stores of data. These techniques have an increasing number of applications in the professional and political spheres, and people try to predict the results of certain courses of action as accurately as possible. Computing Possible Futures explores the use of models on everyday phenomena such as waiting in lines and driving a car, before expanding the model's complexity to look at how large-scale computational models can help imagine big scale " scenarios like the effect self-driving cars on the US economy. The successes and failures of complex real world problems are examined, and it is shown how few, if any, failures are due to model errors or computational difficulties. It is also shown how real life decision makers have addressed important problems and used their model-based understanding of possible futures to inform these decisions. Written in an entertaining and accessible way, Computing Possible Futures will help those concerned about the futurity of their decisions to understand what fundamentally needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and how to do it.
This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker
How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
